Early this spring, I traveled to California to celebrate my father’s 90th birthday. Members of my extended family from as far away as Fiji and New Zealand came to gather, and I was amazed by the connections I saw between cousins who so rarely have the opportunity to meet in person, the instant bonds of love that we offered—even though we live such different lives!

One of my favorite interactions I witnessed that day was between my father, , and a visiting cousin, who just turned seven. This young boy was telling my father all about the planets and the solar system, which he was learning about in school, and found exciting and fascinating. My father, an astronomer who has been studying the planets since the 1960s, could certainly—in today’s “I know more than you!” world—have brushed this little cousin off. Did he need a little boy to tell him about the retrograde rotation of Venus, or the rings of Saturn, things he himself had discovered? Of course not!

But he did. He listened to this little cousin, as if the way he saw the planets and the stars was the most interesting thing in the whole world to him. And only when he knew that learning from him would bring this cousin even more joy and excitement did he begin to tell him about his own ground-breaking work.

The Psalmist teaches us that the world will be built through chesed (Psalm 89). But what, as we ask in our Tikkun Middot course, is so great about the middah of chesed that it, among all others, will build the worlds?

Chesed is one of the few mitzvot in the Mishnah with no minimum requirement for it to “count.” Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe writes, “A nice word, a smile – these can give new life to someone who has given up on himself! A word of encouragement can bring joy. These are such small things [yet so significant!]”

To build our daily worlds through a lens of lovingkindness is to approach each act we do with a perspective of love. Not to ask: how might I make this moment better? But to ask: How might I relate to this moment—as it already is—with love?

How might I hold myself with love?

I hope the practices enclosed in this month’s letter give you some space to find your own way to build your own world with love.